Sippin on the Rocks: Scottish Granite Cools Your Scotch
"Sippin on the Rocks" are little cubes of granite hewn from the Scottish countryside, designed to be chilled in your freezer, then placed in your glass to cool your scotch without watering it down. Cute, if a little odd. I'm going to go on record and say that I like my scotch just ever so slightly watered down, either with about a teaspoon of tap water or a single chip or small cube of ice. It may impugn the full flavor of the whisky, but at least I'm not worried a hunk of granite will slide out of the glass into my teeth, either.
A set of two cubes, including a custom wooden box, is $75 shipped.
Product Page [SippinOnTheRocks.com via Thrillist]
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Many single malt scotches can benefit from being mixed with a small amount of water, which brings out the bouquet and helps keep the alcohol from numbing the tongue.
I'm not the most experienced scotch drinker in the world, but I think a purist would rather have his scotch a little too watery than a little too cold.
As an avid scotch drinker and connoisseur, this is frivolous IMO.
It's worse than frivolous; it's fool money. $75 for two cubes of rock and a wooden box?
Joel, I'm of the opinion that the full flavor of Scotch comes out only when you add a bit of water to it.
A little bit of water can really open up a scotch or make it more palatable to those that don't like it straight. Chilling scotch just dulls your tongue and the flavor. This product is not only frivolous but thoroughly in opposition to proper appreciation of fine scotch.
I guess that's what you get from a company that informs us, on their "About Us" page, that they are taking scotch drinking cues from a "Canadian Geochemist."
I have an relative in Edinburgh who says "Never drink Scotch without water; never drink water without Scotch." Though to be fair, I think this old saying might be referring more to cask-strength whiskey than the already watered down stuff you get in most bottles.
My flatmate and I heard about the frozen rocks thing, so we did some research and calculations, tested a few different types of stone out, and determined that ice cubes work a lot better.
Why not just freeze the glass?
Scotch should be drunk with as much as a third of water added -- 25%, certainly not more, but a spoonful isn't enough. It really opens it up. Cask strength should be cut by a third to a half. A small amount of ice is good, too; you're not trying to get it COLD, just a few degrees less than your overheated 72 degree room. Freezing the glass is insane, but these idiotic granite blobs are an assault on decency. This is SkyMall-level "connoisseur" crapola.
You shouldn't drink Single Malt Scotch from tumblers (the kind of glass shown in the pic) but from something like a sherry glass. Tumblers are for Bourbon. If you like your American Whisky on Scottish rocks, well here you go.
Those rocks wouldn't fit into a sherry glass.
Any good bar in Scotland will either have a jug of water or a brass tap on the counter solely for the use of adding water to scotch. Different waters will benefit different whiskies too: Edinburgh tap water is naturally soft and peaty (and brown on bad days - very disconcerting when you run a bath) and benefits the local blends like Baillie Nicol Jarvie or, oddly enough, Whyte and Mackay, which outsells the most popular national brand, Teachers. So definitely yes. Ice is a definite no as it will cause the oils to separate, and a bleedin' great chunk of granite will just poke you in the eye.
I hope those edges are polished on the granite, other wise the might chink and chip the glass on the inside.
Old news, in scandinavia we have had them for years. And ours are cheaper! (One example: http://www.graniteice.com/)
For far too long now we've taken our ice cubes for granite.
Also, if the granite's from Aberdeen, you might want to think about this:
"Granite is a normal, geological, source of radiation in the natural environment. Granite contains around 10 to 20 parts per million of uranium.
Granite could be considered a potential natural radiological hazard as, for instance, villages located over granite may be susceptible to higher doses of radiation than other communites."
Radioactive whisky!
#14: I'm already looking to mixed drinks that self-illuminate with Cherenkov radaiation.
I got a set of Scandinavian ones a few years ago.
They made all my drinks taste like dirt. There was no dirt ON them, they were perfectly clean, but it gave everything a strange earth taste like, well, licking a rock. I scrubbed and cleaned them, but the end result was the same in every drink I tried.
In the end, though, the stone granite cubes made neat desk fidgits. Something about little stone cubes makes you want to play with them all day.